MLA Seminar: Classical Traditions

This course will introduce you to some of the most influential texts in the western literary tradition. From the ancient Mediterranean to contemporary America, authors have revisited some especially compelling themes and stories, continually reshaping what these traditions mean. In this course, we will focus on three genres, loosely defined, and examine how they changed over the centuries. With epic, we will read selections of several long poems from ancient Greece to early modern England that depict heroic individuals negotiating competing claims on their identities from community and religion. We will then turn to lyric poetry, broadly defined as shorter, more personal works on a variety of topics up to the modern era. Finally, several tragedies will occupy our attention, with special attention to performance. By going back and forth between ancient and modern texts rather than progressing linearly through time, we will explore the plural in Classical Traditions and emphasize the variety of responses to ancient texts across various media and historical periods.